Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Market

[headline]Articulates life writing's complex engagement with the nineteenth-century literary market Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market begins from the premise that nineteenth-century life writing circulated in a market, in material and discursive forms determined substantially by the desires of publishers, readers, editors, printers, booksellers and the many other craftsmen and tradesmen who collaborated in transforming first-person narrative into a commodified thing. Studies of nineteenth-century life writing have typically focused on the major autobiographers, or on the formation of 'genre', or on the ways in which different class, gender, race and other affiliations shaped particular kinds of exemplary subjectivities. The aim of this collection, on the other hand, is to focus on life writing in terms of profits and sales, contracts and copyright, printing and illustration - to treat life writing, through particular case studies and through attentive analysis of print and material cultures, as one commodity among many in the vast, complicated literary market of nineteenth-century England. [bio]Sean Grass is Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he specialises in Victorian literature and culture, the book market, the Victorian novel, life writing and the works of Charles Dickens. He has published three monographs: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace (2019); Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History (2014); and The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2004).